Run and stop an ASIO I/O service

This example doesn't do anything useful, but should clarify how you could use Boost ASIO to control the execution of a multithread application.

Our main thread will create a bunch of worker threads, do some job, and finally terminate gracefully.

ASIO would be used to synchronize the job. The I/O service is created by the main thread and passed to the worker by reference, remember that it is a non-copyable object, it won't make sense to pass an ASIO I/O service by value, and if you try to do that, you are going to have a compiler error.

The worker threads are running a dummy function that just dumps a couple of messages, one before, and one after calling run() on the I/O service.

The main thread has provided a dummy I/O service work object, so that the run() called by the workers result in let them hang on it. At this point the main thread will be the only active one, and it would do whatever is its job before calling the stop() function on the ASIO I/O service. That would let terminate the execution of run() on each worker.

Last duty of the main thread is join all its spawned threads, and then it could happily terminate.

The code run by the workers won't be anything more than this:

void worker(boost::asio::io_service& aios, int id) // 1
{
    dump(id, "first step"); // 2
    aios.run(); // 3
    dump(id, "last step");
}

1. The ASIO I/O service object is passed by reference, we are actually working on the same object of the caller.
2. We are in a multithread environment, and we are accessing a shared resource, the standard output console. We have to rule its access by a mutex, if we want to avoid unpleasant mixups, and this is what the dump() function does.
3. Let's run the service.

Here is the code executed by the main thread:

boost::asio::io_service aios; // 1
boost::asio::io_service::work work(aios); // 2

boost::thread_group threads; // 3
for(int i = 0; i < 6; ++i )
    threads.create_thread(std::bind(worker, std::ref(aios), i)); // 4

dump("Main thread has spawned a bunch of threads");
boost::this_thread::sleep(boost::posix_time::seconds(1)); // 5
aios.stop(); // 6
dump("Main thread asked ASIO io service to stop");
threads.join_all(); // 7
dump("Worker threads joined");

1. The ASIO I/O service object is created. 2. A dummy ASIO work is put on the service. 3. We want to manage a group of threads, the Boost class thread_group has been designed exactly for that. 4. The worker function has to be adapted to become suitable for the create_thread() request, that's way I used std::bind(). Besides, I need to enforce that the ASIO I/O service object is passed by reference, and that is the reason for using std::ref(). 5. Using this framework just to let the main thread to take a one second nap is a kind of overkilling, but I guess you see the point. 6. Main thread is ready to terminate, so it issues a request to ASIO to stop its work. 7. And after ensuring all the threads have joined, we can terminated the application. The full C++ source code for this example is freely available on github.